What is the current situation?

At present, the Criminal Procedure Code, in particular Article 233(3), regulates the “legalization” of an urgent search as follows:

• the owner or possessor of the searched home or other premises does not take part in the consideration of the motion concerning the urgent search;
• rulings granting or refusing authorization for an urgent search cannot be appealed;
• the Code does not specify the deadline by which the investigator and prosecutor must file a motion for authorization of an urgent search that has already been conducted;
• there is no special deadline for returning property seized during an urgent search if its subsequent legalization is refused.

In addition, Article 214 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which governs the grounds for and commencement of pre-trial investigations, provides that criminal proceedings are opened on any report of a criminal offense, and refusing to accept such a report is not permitted.

What changes are proposed?

Alternative Draft Law No. 15488-3, supported by MPs at first reading, proposes the following changes regarding urgent searches:

• the owner or possessor of the searched home or other premises will be able to take part in the consideration of the motion concerning the urgent search;
• rulings granting or refusing authorization for an urgent search may be appealed;
• the investigator or prosecutor will have 72 hours to file a motion concerning an urgent search with the investigating judge, and the judge will have three days to consider it;
• property temporarily seized during an urgent search is to be returned if the prosecutor does not approve the motion concerning the search or if the investigating judge refuses to authorize it.

The author of the document, MP Serhii Ionushas, also proposes giving investigators and prosecutors the right to refuse to open criminal proceedings if a report contains insufficient information about the criminal offense committed.

What are the advantages of alternative Draft Law No. 15488-3?

Five draft laws, four of them alternatives, propose to regulate urgent searches, which confirms how pressing the problem is. They reflect two different approaches to change. Some try to strengthen the safeguards of subsequent judicial oversight but at the same time create new risks to the effectiveness of investigations (No. 15488) and to the admissibility of evidence (No. 15488-1 and No. 15488-2); others go far beyond the subject of the main draft law (No. 15488-4). 

The decision of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Law Enforcement to support alternative Draft Law No. 15488-3 by Serhii Ionushas at first reading, with revisions under Article 116 of the Law of Ukraine on the Rules of Procedure of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, was the right one.

The draft contains precisely those procedural mechanisms, namely the person’s participation in subsequent judicial oversight and appellate review, whose absence was one of the central concerns about the main Draft Law No. 15488. 

Although some of its provisions also need adjustment, this version is the best basis for meaningful changes to judicial oversight of urgent searches as a legal institution. It responds directly to the key problem of the main draft and gives the possessor of the property the right to take part in the consideration of the motion for authorization of a search already conducted.

Moreover, compared with the main draft law, Draft Law No. 15488-3 takes a more systematic approach to returning property temporarily seized during an urgent search, since the Criminal Procedure Code currently provides no grounds whatsoever for returning such property. The draft law proposes that property seized during an urgent search be returned on the basis of a prosecutor’s decision or a court ruling refusing authorization of the search.

Which risky provisions should be removed from the alternative draft law?

Serhii Ionushas’s alternative Draft Law No. 15488-3 contains a number of positive innovations that improve oversight of urgent searches and inspections, as well as of the return of property temporarily seized during them. Above all, it deserves credit for allowing the possessor of such property to take part in the hearing on authorization of an urgent search or inspection. 

However, the draft law itself has certain shortcomings and gaps, which, in our view, should be corrected.

1. Appeals against rulings on urgent searches or inspections

One of the most critical concerns about alternative Draft Law No. 15488-3 is that it opens the possibility of appealing rulings granting or refusing authorization for an urgent search or inspection.

It is true that as early as 2006, in Panteleyenko v. Ukraine, the ECHR found that Ukraine had violated Article 13 of the Convention on Human Rights because the possessor of searched property had no domestic remedy against violations of the right to respect for one’s home guaranteed by Article 8 of the Convention. The ECHR set out its most recent concerns on this issue in 2025 in Korniyets and Others v. Ukraine, noting that national (Ukrainian) law does not allow the owner or user of property to take part in the consideration of a motion for authorization of a search or inspection that has already been conducted (that is, an urgent one).

Scholars believe that reviewing the lawfulness and justification of such a restriction at later stages of court proceedings may not be an effective means of restoring the violated rights, so a prompt review mechanism is objectively needed.

Alternative Draft Law No. 15488-3 does fix this shortcoming by expressly granting the person whose home or other premises were searched and inspected the right to take part in the consideration of the investigator’s or prosecutor’s motion for authorization of the urgent search or inspection.

The author also proposes allowing appeals against rulings authorizing a search or inspection and against rulings refusing such authorization. 

Proposals to grant such a right of appeal have already appeared in some earlier draft laws, in particular No. 13599. However, this proposal seems premature and risks overloading the appellate courts. It also threatens to create unequal conditions for possessors of property searched in the ordinary manner, that is, on the basis of a court ruling.

Moreover, under this draft law, persons whose premises were subjected to an urgent search will already have the right to present their position before the investigating judge, which will introduce a domestic remedy against violations of the right to respect for privacy.

Therefore, the possibility of appealing rulings granting or refusing authorization for an urgent search or inspection should be removed from the alternative draft law.

2. Consequences of missing the deadline for obtaining authorization of an urgent search or inspection

One of the most appropriate proposals of alternative Draft Law No. 15488-3 is to introduce a clear deadline for the investigator or prosecutor to file a motion for authorization of an urgent search after it has been conducted. 

The draft proposes that such a motion be filed not “immediately,” but no later than 72 hours after the relevant investigative action.

An analysis of case law and scholarship shows that, after conducting such urgent investigative actions, the prosecution does not always apply to the investigating judge for authorization equally urgently. In one case, for example, the investigator applied to the investigating judge for authorization of an urgent search only five days after it was conducted. The text of the decision gives no explanation of why the investigator was unable to do so “immediately”; what is more, the case concerned the illegal handling of weapons.

In its ruling in case No. 466/525/22, the Supreme Court stated: “arbitrary compliance with the rule of immediate retrospective judicial review, that is, after the time objectively required for this has elapsed, does not meet the criterion of ‘immediacy’ unless the circumstances in the criminal proceedings file indicate objective and insurmountable obstacles to filing the relevant motion as soon as possible, and constitutes a violation of Article 233(3) of the Criminal Procedure Code.” 

According to scholars, such practices generally escape proper procedural assessment by investigating judges, which leads to the legalization of search results obtained in breach of the law.

However, the 72-hour deadline alone cannot discipline the prosecution, since missing it carries no negative consequences. Therefore, the new deadline rule will be merely declaratory.

Given the need to ensure the fastest possible retrospective judicial review of interference with the right to respect for private and family life, it is necessary to establish that filing a motion after the deadline must be grounds for returning the motion, unless the prosecution proves that objective and insurmountable obstacles prevented it from applying in time.

3. Commencement of a pre-trial investigation based on a report

The debate over the unconditional obligation of an investigator or prosecutor to accept a report of a criminal offense and open an investigation has been going on for years. On the one hand, abolishing this obligation would relieve pre-trial investigation bodies of the need to register, and later close, criminal proceedings opened on the basis of completely meaningless reports. On the other hand, unjustified refusals to open investigations into actual criminal offenses would become more frequent.

Statistics from the State Judicial Administration also show that in 2025, out of 42,270 complaints against refusals to register criminal proceedings, investigating judges found in 25,066 cases that law enforcement had unlawfully refused to register proceedings, and found the refusal justified in only 8,662 cases.

Indeed, on the one hand, the statistics show that unjustified refusals by investigators and prosecutors to accept reports outnumber justified ones; on the other hand, they confirm the quality of judicial oversight in this area.

The authors propose relieving law enforcement agencies by creating a preliminary filter under which investigators and prosecutors would check whether a report contains “circumstances that may indicate the commission of a criminal offense.” The draft law also proposes to clarify that a report must contain “a sufficient body of information enabling the investigator, inquiry officer, or prosecutor to reach a reasoned conclusion that a person’s actions or omissions constitute a socially dangerous act containing the elements of a criminal offense under the Criminal Code of Ukraine.”

Overall, this proposal deserves support, but the criteria for screening reports appear overly strict. Read literally, these provisions mean that only reports clearly setting out all the elements of a criminal offense will be registered, which is unrealistic for the average citizen.

A more appropriate approach would be to require that a report contain information enabling the investigator and prosecutor to reach a reasoned conclusion that a criminal offense has occurred, rather than that all the elements of the offense are present.

It should therefore be provided that a report of a criminal offense is registered if it substantiates that an offense has occurred, since proving the presence of the elements of the offense, including the person’s intent to commit it, would place an excessive burden on the victim or the person filing the report.

What should be avoided when finalizing Draft Law No. 15488-3?

Once alternative Draft Law No. 15488-3 has been adopted as a basis, it is important that problematic proposals from the main and other alternative draft laws do not find their way into it during finalization.

In particular, this concerns the requirement in the main Draft Law No. 15488 that the prosecutor must state the following in the decision to conduct an urgent search:

• information about “specific, individually identified property in respect of which sufficient evidence has been gathered in the criminal proceedings to provide reasonable grounds to believe that such property has or may have the characteristics of physical evidence”; 
• the reality of a “specific and immediate threat of destruction, damage, or loss” of such property;
• the impossibility of obtaining an investigating judge’s ruling authorizing entry into a person’s home or other premises because of the risk of losing such property.

Such changes could undermine the “urgency” of a search or inspection by making it harder to conduct, which would ultimately also increase the risk of property, including evidence, being destroyed.

Serhii Vlasenko’s alternative Draft Law No. 15488-1 also carries significant risks. It proposes to link almost any deviation from the requirements for conducting an urgent search, regardless of its nature and significance, to the inadmissibility of all evidence obtained directly or derivatively. The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized that “not every formal failure to comply with the requirements of the criminal procedure law renders evidence inadmissible … to declare evidence inadmissible under Article 87(1) of the Criminal Procedure Code, the court must specify the violation of which fundamental right or freedom resulted in obtaining this evidence.” The proposed changes could lead to criminal proceedings being closed or defendants being acquitted solely because of minor formal violations.

Draft law No. 15488-2 by Antonina Slavytska and Oleksandr Tkachenko largely reproduces the main draft as regards urgent entry and therefore retains its key problems, including the requirement concerning specific, individually identified property. However, it proposes much broader changes to the Criminal Procedure Code: applying the general principles of criminal proceedings to gaps in the law exclusively in the interests of the defense, which could undermine their coherence and the adversarial nature of proceedings. It also proposes declaring inadmissible any evidence obtained in breach of the procedure, regardless of the nature and significance of the breach. This distorts the current approach of assessing inadmissibility on the merits, which is upheld, among others, by the Supreme Court. 

Draft law No. 15488-4 by Hryhorii Mamka goes far beyond the issue of urgent searches. It simultaneously changes the powers of the prosecutor, depriving prosecutors of the right to conduct investigative actions, as well as the rules for conducting investigative and covert investigative actions, temporary access, the commencement of pre-trial investigations, and other institutions of the Criminal Procedure Code. 

Therefore, when finalizing the main draft law, the risky provisions of Draft Laws No. 15488, No. 15488-1, No. 15488-2, and No. 15488-4 should be avoided.

Conclusions

Urgent searches as a legal concept have needed reform for years, and Draft Law No. 15488-3 could become a good basis for closing the most critical gaps, which the ECHR, among others, has highlighted.

Transparency International Ukraine therefore supports the adoption of Draft Law No. 15488-3 at second reading, provided that it is revised. During its revision under Article 116 of the Law of Ukraine on the Rules of Procedure of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, our recommendations must be taken into account:

• remove the possibility of appealing rulings granting or refusing authorization for an urgent search or inspection;
• establish that filing a motion after the deadline must be grounds for denying the motion concerning the search, unless the prosecution proves that objective and insurmountable obstacles prevented it from applying in time;
• provide that a report of a criminal offense is registered if it substantiates that an offense has occurred, rather than that all the elements of the offense are present;
• avoid the risky provisions of Draft Laws No. 15488, No. 15488-1, No. 15488-2, and No. 15488-4.

Come Back Alive

According to the foundation, as of October 15, 2026, it had received more than UAH 275 million (UAH 275,412,872.21) under plea agreements.

By period, the receipts were as follows:

• 2024: UAH 32,000,000.00;
• 2025: UAH 67,540,741.00;
• January 1 to October 15, 2026: UAH 175,872,131.21.

The foundation also stated in its response that it had not received any property, property rights, or crypto assets in execution of such agreements.

On the use of the money, Come Back Alive described separately the aid already delivered and the procurement still underway.

According to the foundation, UAH 214,854,555.07 was spent on procuring equipment and other supplies and handing them over to the military in three areas:

• UAH 81,718,129.61 to meet the needs of Army Aviation units of the Land Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine;
• UAH 12,729,795.00 to meet the needs of units of the 19th Army Corps of the Land Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine;
• UAH 120,406,630.46 to implement the DRONEFALL project.

Another UAH 60,558,317.14 was still being spent as of October 15. Of this amount, UAH 4.36 million is going toward procurement for Army Aviation and UAH 56.2 million toward funding DRONEFALL. Once the procurement is completed, the aid is handed over, and the paperwork is finalized, the foundation will publish the relevant reports.

In its response, Come Back Alive also cited data from the units participating in DRONEFALL, according to which 499 Russian reconnaissance and strike UAVs had been shot down using the equipment provided.

Sternenko Community

The Sternenko Community Foundation reported receiving funds in execution of agreements in five criminal cases. In total, these amounted to UAH 51 million and 20,021 USDT. The USDT was valued at UAH 888,932.49 at the exchange rate on the date it was credited. As a result, the total receipts amounted to almost UAH 52 million (UAH 51,888,932.49) in hryvnia equivalent.

In its response, the foundation provided the following breakdown of receipts:

• 2025: UAH 49 million under three HACC decisions; 
• first three quarters of 2026: UAH 2 million and 20,021 USDT under two HACC decisions.

The foundation explained that it received no funds in 2023–2024 because it was registered as a legal entity only on January 15, 2025.

The funds received under the agreements were spent in full on procuring equipment for the Defense Forces, with the following breakdown of expenditures:

• 1,930 Hornet FPV drones of various modifications, worth a total of UAH 49,376,680.00 (from the case concerning the procurement of PCR tests for a Ukrzaliznytsia branch, the case against one of the organizers of the scheme to misappropriate the seized “Kurchenko’s oil products,” and the case against an accomplice in the misappropriation of almost 920 hectares of land belonging to the state enterprise Research Farm Dmytrivka);
• 25 Sting R4 UAVs with digital thermal imaging cameras, worth a total of UAH 2,090,000.00 (the case of Oleksii Statnyk, former director of a Ukrzaliznytsia branch);
• one Mavka unmanned aircraft system (digital, daytime version), worth a total of UAH 1,983,400.00 (the case against the former director of the state enterprise Poltava Region Local Roads Agency).

The foundation also explained why the total value of the aid, UAH 53.45 million, exceeds the UAH 51.89 million received under the agreements. The difference of approximately UAH 1.56 million was covered by other charitable donations.

Sternenko Community stated that it will publish reporting materials once the procurement is completed, the property is handed over, and the supporting documents are finalized.

How to track the use of funds

In their responses, the foundations provided links to their public reporting resources. Come Back Alive referred to its reporting section, materials on its website, and its social media posts. According to the foundation, these contain information on the contributions it receives and how they are used, including receipts under plea agreements. 

Sternenko Community provided a link to its own reporting section. Its website features daily reports on drone deliveries, reports on other property handed over, and calendar-based reporting.

As we can see, the data obtained on receipts from plea agreements and their use demonstrate the transparency and reliability of the Come Back Alive and Sternenko Community charitable foundations. This once again underscores that, despite public concerns and doubts about the misuse of funds received under plea agreements, donations to the army, including through private charitable foundations, are an important condition of plea agreements, given the context in which the criminal justice system currently operates. 

According to the SAPO, no cases of intentional non-compliance with plea agreements have been identified so far, and no convicted person has been held liable for breaching the terms of an agreement. Compliance is confirmed by payment documents, which are submitted to the court and the prosecutor and added to the case file. In other words, the transfer of funds is verified, but solely by the SAPO. 

At the same time, public communication about how these specific plea agreement funds are spent remains rather weak, and both the prosecution and the foundations should probably address this. If the public wants reporting specifically on funds from HACC plea agreement verdicts, foundations and fundraising platforms, both state and private, should regularly publish such detailed information on exactly what the funds from these verdicts were spent on. This would help clarify which of the army’s needs are being met through donations and put an end to any doubts about how these funds are spent.

What is the current situation?

Reform of forensic examinations is a long-standing and unresolved problem in Ukraine’s justice system. The reasons include the following:

• Ukraine has no independent expert institution specializing in examinations in criminal proceedings under NABU jurisdiction. Similar specialized institutions do exist under other agencies, namely the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the State Border Guard Service, and the Security Service of Ukraine.
• There are no dedicated legal mechanisms for responding to pressure on experts.
• As a general rule, any expert institution has 90 days to conduct an examination, and this period can be extended.
• Not all expert institutions can prioritize examinations or have criteria for doing so.
• Examinations are assigned to experts by the head of the institution rather than by an automated system.
• By law, an expert’s minimum base salary is 10 subsistence minimums. However, this provision has been suspended by budget laws for 8 years, so actual pay may be lower.
• The Register of Forensic Examination Methodologies publishes only a list of methodologies, without their content.
• Private expert institutions have no right to conduct any criminalistic examinations.

What does the main draft law propose?

The main draft law would establish an independent expert center that would prioritize NABU and SAPO cases. It would also provide better financial, material, and technical conditions for other experts. 

To this end, the authors propose to:

• reorganize the Research Center for Independent Forensic Examinations (RCIFE) in line with the law’s requirements, so that it conducts forensic examinations in a specific category of cases, in particular corruption and corruption-related cases, based on the criteria of NABU jurisdiction;
• guarantee the RCIFE’s independence by establishing a Supervisory Board of 5 members (3 of them from international partners), which would hold a competitive selection of the center’s director. The authors also plan to introduce independent certification of experts and an independent procedure for bringing them to disciplinary liability, an audit of the center every 2 years, separate funding, and other safeguards;
• establish a procedure for responding to pressure on experts;
• set a shorter period of 60 days for the RCIFE to conduct an examination, with the possibility of extension;
• allow the RCIFE director to give priority to examinations for NABU and SAPO;
• ensure automated assignment of examinations among RCIFE experts;
• raise minimum base salaries to 40 subsistence minimums for RCIFE experts and to 30 for experts at other institutions, and prohibit budget laws from reducing them;
• publish in the Register of Forensic Examination Methodologies not only the list of methodologies but also their content, except for restricted information;
• allow private expert institutions to conduct certain criminalistic examinations at the RCIFE, with the list to be determined by the Ministry of Justice.

What are the advantages of the main draft law?

The main draft law offers a comprehensive solution to one of the most acute problems in complex NABU and SAPO corruption and corruption-related cases: the Bureau’s lack of access to independent forensic examination. The European Commission, the IMF, and other international partners, on whom Ukraine’s EU accession and financial support depend, have repeatedly drawn attention to this problem.

The Rule of Law Roadmap also stresses that NABU must have effective access to impartial, timely, and high-quality forensic examinations. Independent examinations for NABU will support high-quality investigations, which may in turn make it possible to recover criminal assets, including taxpayers’ money that officials sought to profit from. According to the Head of SAPO, it is precisely the lack of such examinations that directly affects how quickly and effectively corrupt officials are brought to criminal liability.

In complex corruption cases, expert opinions are often what makes it possible to establish the amount of damage, the origin of assets, and the substance of financial transactions, and to examine documents and digital evidence. Accordingly, the quality and speed of examinations directly affect both the prospects of proving the charges and the state’s ability to recover proceeds of crime.

The latest example, from the Themis and Forrest Gump cases, confirms this from the mouth of one of the persons involved himself: giving the NABU access to independent examination would cause him and his alleged accomplice a great many problems.

The main advantage of the draft law is that it creates an institutionally independent examination system for NABU and SAPO cases. The RCIFE will have separate funding, a special governance procedure, and its own guarantees of independence. Its director will be selected through a competition and may be dismissed only on grounds set out in law. This is a fundamental departure from the current model, under which the heads of state expert institutions are appointed and dismissed by the Ministry of Justice or another agency. At the same time, a Supervisory Board involving international experts will serve as an additional safeguard against political or administrative interference in the Center’s work.

The institution’s independence is complemented by personal guarantees for RCIFE experts themselves. Their certification and disciplinary liability will be handled by a separate Expert Qualification Commission and Disciplinary Chamber. This should reduce the scope for pressuring experts with the threat of dismissal, loss of qualification, or disciplinary proceedings. In the event of undue influence, an expert will also be required to report it to the director or the Supervisory Board.

These guarantees are reinforced by adequate pay for the center’s staff. The draft law proposes setting the minimum base salary of RCIFE experts at 40 subsistence minimums (UAH 133,120 in 2026) and that of experts at other state institutions at 30 subsistence minimums (UAH 99,840 in 2026). This should help attract and retain qualified specialists and, at the same time, reduce corruption risks associated with low pay. This is especially relevant given that experts currently earn UAH 25,000–30,000, while the statutory minimum salary of even 10 subsistence minimums has not been applied in practice since 2018, as it is suspended every year by the State Budget laws.

Another important change is ending the manual assignment of examinations to experts. At present, the specific expert in a state expert institution is usually chosen by its head. The draft law instead introduces automated assignment of examinations among RCIFE experts. This significantly narrows administrative discretion and makes it harder to hand a sensitive examination to the “right” expert in advance.

Faster examinations are just as important. Long waits for expert opinions are one of the factors that drag out complex NABU investigations. One example is the multi-episode proceedings related, among other things, to possible influence on examinations in the “Medvedchuk pipeline” case, in which investigators needed several different types of examinations at once. 

The problem of time limits is compounded by the risk of leaks. Fearing premature disclosure of investigation materials, the NABU is in some cases forced to delay handing them over to experts. 

A separate institution with stronger guarantees of independence, combined with a shorter standard examination period (60 days instead of 90) and the ability to prioritize the most urgent examinations, should reduce both risks.

Finally, the draft law may make expert opinions more predictable and easier to verify. Publishing the content of forensic examination methodologies, except for restricted information, will allow the parties and the court to check how an opinion was reached and whether the examination followed the established methodology. This should also help standardize expert practice and reduce cases in which similar examinations produce substantially different results without proper scientific justification.

The draft law’s merit, therefore, is not simply that it creates yet another state expert institution. It proposes to change the very model of forensic examination in high-level corruption cases: to protect the institution from external administrative influence, the expert from personal pressure, each examination from manual assignment, and the investigation from excessive delays.

A further advantage of the document is that it sets out in detail the transition from the existing Research Center for Forensic Examinations of the Ministry of Justice to the independent RCIFE. The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine will have three months from the law’s entry into force to ensure a decision on reorganizing (transforming) the existing Center in line with the new requirements and to form the Supervisory Board in the manner set out in the law. It is at this stage that the key safeguard of independence, a supervisory body with international participation, is meant to begin operating. Within the same three months, when preparing the draft State Budget Law for 2027, the government is expected to provide a separate budget expenditure program for the RCIFE’s operation, which is a practical guarantee of the institution’s separate funding. The government must also ensure the adoption of secondary legislation and bring ministries’ regulations into line with the new Law. 

The Ministry of Justice will have five months to approve the RCIFE Charter in line with the Law’s requirements. Within another six months, the Ministry must take inventory of forensic examination methodologies, both those already entered in the Register of Methodologies and those applied outside it. This will make it possible to identify all restricted methodologies and the grounds for restricting them. It will also ensure that methodologies are published in the Register, except for restricted information, as open data available for free viewing. The draft law thus does not merely declare the principle that methodologies should be transparent; it sets a specific timeline and institutional mechanism for putting it into practice.

Why should the alternative draft laws be rejected?

The alternative draft laws by MPs Serhii Vlasenko and Volodymyr Kabachenko do not propose a separate forensic expert institution for the NABU or any other legislative measures that would give the Bureau real access to timely, independent, and high-quality forensic examinations. The two draft laws are virtually identical, apart from a few provisions. 

In fact, neither document proposes changes that would ensure high-quality examinations in high-level corruption cases, since none of the risks of influence on experts are eliminated. Nor do they fulfill Ukraine’s international commitments to give the NABU access to high-quality examinations.

Instead, the alternative documents propose to formally enshrine in the Law of Ukraine on the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine rights that NABU detectives already have under criminal procedure legislation: to order an examination on their own and to determine the questions put to the expert. In other words, this provision changes absolutely nothing.

In addition, a large block of amendments is devoted to deregulating forensic expert activity, in particular by abolishing the certification procedure. Both authors of the alternative draft laws propose allowing forensic examinations to be conducted by “individuals who have the special knowledge necessary to provide an opinion on the questions under examination and at least five years of professional experience in the relevant field of knowledge.” This means that any individual, in some fields even without higher education, would be able to provide expert opinions.

Such practice is indeed common in foreign jurisdictions. Alongside experts with special status, other specialists may be engaged ad hoc, and their opinions may be recognized as proper expert evidence. However, admitting such experts does not, as a rule, remove the need to verify their competence. Competence must be confirmed either in advance through an appropriate professional or registration procedure or directly when the expert is engaged in specific proceedings. Likewise, the absence of special certification does not rule out other mechanisms for ensuring an expert’s proper conduct and accountability. 

Several foreign legal systems also lack the clear distinction between the procedural status of an expert and that of a specialist that is characteristic of Ukrainian criminal procedure. This allows a wider range of persons to be engaged as experts, with their competence confirmed by knowledge and skills rather than special status.

However, the model proposed by MPs Vlasenko and Kabachenko does not reflect international best practices: it allows any individuals with sufficient experience and practice to conduct examinations. Moreover, the draft laws do not even specify who would be responsible for their quasi-certification, that is, for verifying their experience, practical skills, and knowledge.

Another important argument is made in a study on the qualifications of forensic experts. It states that a forensic expert’s specialized knowledge should not be equated solely with knowledge in the fields of science and technology on which the classes, kinds, types, and subtypes of examinations are based. In the author’s view, without knowledge of the general scientific foundations of forensic examination and its procedural framework, it is impossible to conduct an examination properly and document its results so that the expert opinion is admissible and reliable evidence.

The model in the Vlasenko and Kabachenko draft laws is underdeveloped. It proposes “delicensing” forensic expert activity without an adequate alternative for verifying an expert’s subjective and objective competence. As a result, it could open the door to abuse, undermine trust in forensic expert opinions, and overload court proceedings with checks on the reliability of such opinions.

Worse still, Kabachenko’s draft law No. 15569-2 also seeks to insert into the Law of Ukraine on Forensic Examination, bypassing the Criminal Procedure Code, provisions declaring inadmissible all evidence that the prosecution refused to provide to the defense for examination.

The alternative amendments also propose to deregulate the procedure and grounds for bringing forensic experts to disciplinary liability. Only experts in employment or service relationships would be punished for disciplinary offenses, while others would not be subject to such liability. 

In addition, Vlasenko and Kabachenko propose deleting entirely from the Law of Ukraine on Forensic Examination the articles on expert qualification commissions, which are also responsible for imposing disciplinary penalties on experts.

Ukraine does need deregulation of the forensic examination sector, but the approach must take into account and minimize all the associated risks. Deregulation on this scale, without a well-grounded alternative model, will only increase corruption risks, lower the quality of forensic expert opinions, and make them harder to use in court.

What should be improved in the main draft law

The main draft law proposes genuinely high-quality changes that can make a real difference to the effectiveness and results of NABU and SAPO investigations. However, to bring it as close to ideal as current conditions allow, two aspects should be improved.

1. Clarify the list of proceedings in which the RCIFE may conduct examinations

The main draft law proposes adding to Article 7-2(1) of the Law of Ukraine on Forensic Examination a provision establishing the RCIFE as an independent expert institution that would conduct forensic examinations in the following categories of cases:

• criminal proceedings concerning corruption offenses and corruption-related criminal offenses under Article 45 of the Criminal Code, as well as Articles 206-2, 209, and 211 of the Criminal Code, if at least one of the conditions set out in paragraphs 1–3 of Article 216(5) of the Criminal Procedure Code is met;
• cases on declaring assets unjustified and recovering them to the state (civil forfeiture).

As a result, the proposed wording of Article 7-2(1) of the Law on Forensic Examination would not, in practice, allow the NABU to have independent examinations conducted at the RCIFE in all cases under the Bureau’s jurisdiction. 

The reason is that, under certain conditions, NABU jurisdiction also covers cases under Articles 384, 385, 386, 387, 388, and 396 of the Criminal Code (Article 216(7) of the Criminal Procedure Code); cases under Articles 354 and 364–370 of the Criminal Code if committed by a Bureau employee (the fourth subparagraph of paragraph 3 of Article 216(5) of the Criminal Procedure Code); and cases under other articles of the Criminal Code if the NABU Director so decides with the consent of the Head of SAPO (the third subparagraph of paragraph 3 of Article 216(5) of the Criminal Procedure Code).

Therefore, to cover examinations in all NABU cases as fully as possible, the wording should be expanded so that the RCIFE conducts forensic examinations specifically in criminal proceedings investigated by NABU, including those under NABU jurisdiction, as well as in cases on declaring assets unjustified and recovering them to the state.

1. Specify certain technical provisions of the draft law

On reporting pressure: the law only obliges an expert to notify the RCIFE Director within two working days (or the Supervisory Board, if the pressure comes from the Director), but sets out no further procedure. There is no deadline for the Director or Supervisory Board to respond to the report, no list of possible response measures (removal from the case, reassignment to another expert, referral to law enforcement), and no obligation to inform the NABU and SAPO, as a party to the proceedings, of the interference with the expert’s work.

On the higher education of Supervisory Board members (Article 17-1(3)): the wording “higher education in law, forensic examination, audit, or financial control” also raises questions, since “forensic examination” is not a separate field of knowledge or specialty in Ukraine’s List of Fields of Knowledge and Specialties for higher education. It is therefore unclear which diploma would satisfy this requirement, which could leave room for arbitrary interpretation when the list of candidates is drawn up.

The draft law should therefore set a deadline for considering reports of pressure on experts, an indicative list of response measures, and an obligation to inform NABU and SAPO of the interference. The education requirement for Supervisory Board members should also be aligned with the List of Fields of Knowledge and Specialties. 

Conclusions

Transparency International Ukraine supports adopting the main Draft Law No. 15569 at first reading, with its provisions to be refined before second reading. The document has significant potential to resolve the long-standing problem of NABU and SAPO access to timely, independent, and high-quality forensic examinations.

However, to fully implement the proposed innovations, our recommendations should be taken into account:

• clearly extend the RCIFE’s mandate to all criminal proceedings investigated by the NABU;
• clarify certain technical points in the mechanism for responding to pressure on experts: a deadline for considering a report of pressure, an indicative list of response measures, and an obligation to inform the NABU and SAPO of the interference. The education requirement for Supervisory Board members should also be aligned with the List of Fields of Knowledge and Specialties.

Addressing these comments will preserve the draft law’s strengths and create a more coherent and predictable model of forensic expert activity.

Alternative draft laws No. 15569-1 and No. 15569-2 do not deserve support because they are ineffective and risk destabilizing the forensic examination sector, so they should be rejected.

How plea agreements are concluded in Ukraine

First, a reminder: a plea agreement is a compromise under criminal law. The state agrees to a more lenient punishment, and in return the accused admits guilt and assumes a number of obligations: to expose accomplices, compensate damages, and accept the agreed punishment. In other words, a plea agreement is about convicting a person and finding them guilty. 

The terms of the agreement are set by the parties: the prosecutor and the accused with defense counsel. The agreement is approved by the court (in high-level corruption cases, the HACC), which does so by delivering a guilty verdict. A person who has entered into a plea agreement is therefore convicted, not “released from liability.”

On receiving the indictment together with the agreement, the court examines whether the agreement’s terms comply with the law and the public interest and whether they violate the rights of others. The court cannot rewrite the agreement or redistribute the payments it provides for. It may only approve the document or refuse to approve it, giving reasons why it contradicts the law. 

Refusals to approve agreements concluded at the pre-trial investigation stage are rare. As of mid-September, the HACC reports only four cases in which an agreement was not approved and the case was returned for pre-trial investigation. In the “Kurchenko’s oil products” case, for instance, the court had previously refused to approve the agreement with Serhii Pashynskyi, finding that it provided for punishments not permitted by law, did not ensure full compensation of damages, and shifted its performance onto an undefined circle of third parties. 

From the start, plea agreements in corruption cases have drawn reservations. The main one is the risk that an agreement would become a way to “cut a deal” with the organizers of schemes who bear the greatest responsibility for the crimes committed. For this reason, the law restricted the categories of persons and the grounds for plea agreements. The new law on plea agreements, adopted in October 2024, broadened these grounds: an agreement can now be concluded if the person exposes another individual’s commission of any corruption or corruption-related crime, and also if the person compensates damages and exposes other persons involved.

At the same time, the law significantly sweetened the “carrot” for the accused. It introduced Article 69-2 of the Criminal Code, which allows a sentence below the minimum set by the sanction where the person exposes others. If the court imposes such a sentence, the person can no longer be released from serving it on probation. 

The maximum term of imprisonment at which a plea agreement may still provide for release on probation was raised from five to eight years. It also became possible to impose an additional fine even where the sanction of the relevant article does not provide for one. The procedure changed as well. Agreements must now be cleared by higher-level prosecutors, depending on the gravity of the offense. A plea agreement with the same person may be resubmitted to the court only once, and only after the grounds on which the court previously refused it have been eliminated. This is exactly what we saw with the second plea agreement concerning Serhii Pashynskyi.

But are these changes enough to ensure truly high-quality agreements, and how have they worked so far? 

On the one hand, for the first time there have been verdicts imposing sentences below the statutory minimum under Article 69-2 of the Criminal Code. In at least three such cases, the convicted persons are serving actual, albeit shorter, prison terms: former Chairman of the Supreme Court Vsevolod Kniaziev, former prosecutor of the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine Volodymyr Derhunov, and former Ministry of Defense official Oleksii Stasiuk. The additional fine under Article 53(3) of the Criminal Code is being applied, though not consistently, as is special confiscation. 

The exposure mechanism is also producing results. According to the SAPO, 15 people have already been convicted on the basis of testimony from convicted persons who agreed to cooperate, and in most proceedings in which such testimony has been or will be given, trials are still ongoing.

As for special confiscation, the law still does not expressly require this instrument to be applied when plea agreements are concluded, although we recommended such an amendment. In our view, this is a gap that must be closed: where there are grounds for special confiscation, the court should approve an agreement only if it provides for it. This would guarantee that the state receives the property obtained through the crime.

This position is supported and expanded upon by the authors of an analysis of 2024–2025 case law prepared by the Centre of Policy and Legal Reform together with the NACP. They specifically note that asset freezes on land plots, vehicles, and funds were often lifted precisely because the agreement did not include a confiscation requirement. In other words, property the state had already frozen was returned to the convicted persons because of how the agreement was worded.

That said, the court’s refusal to approve the agreement with former MP Kachnyi in his illicit enrichment case is telling. The agreement provided for special confiscation of an apartment, a house, and land formally owned by the husband of the late nominal owner. Although the husband had acted under a power of attorney when the apartment was purchased, inherited the property free of charge, and expressly confirmed in court that he was only its nominal owner, the court refused approval. The reason given was that the third party’s awareness of the illegal origin of the funds had allegedly not been proven. In our opinion, these circumstances left no grounds for such doubts.

The main problems with current plea agreements

Despite all their benefits, plea agreements are not always well received by the public, because the state does not always explain such verdicts well. Below are what we see as the main reasons for this.

The first reason is classified verdicts.

The texts of some plea-agreement verdicts, including those concerning Pashynskyi, former Head of the Western Commercial Court of Appeal Plotnitskyi, and others, are fully classified. As a result, the public communications of the court and SAPO make it impossible to learn what exactly the state received in exchange for a lighter sentence. And since these cases very often involve well-known individuals, public outrage at such secrecy becomes a predictable reaction.

One of the earliest and still most notorious cases of a classified verdict is the agreement with former Minister of Ecology Mykola Zlochevskyi, who tried to have the criminal proceedings against him closed by offering a $5 million “super bribe” to the heads of the NABU and the SAPO. Under the plea agreement concluded in August 2023, the HACC fined Zlochevskyi UAH 68,000. In addition, under the terms of the agreement, he donated UAH 660 million to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. That was all. And because the verdict was fully classified, the public never learned whether the “public interest” requirement had been met or whether the state had truly benefited from the deal.

In fact, this agreement became one of the main reasons the need to update legislation on such verdicts was raised at all. Since then, we at TI Ukraine have consistently stressed the need to publish the maximum permissible amount of information about each agreement, so that Ukrainians would not be left asking such questions.

Full classification often fails even in its immediate purpose of concealing cooperation with the investigation. If the law requires the convicted person to testify against accomplices, they will learn about the agreement anyway from the very fact that the proceedings have been separated. 

It is worth recalling that the HACC already knows how to redact individual parts of a verdict without classifying the entire text. For example, in the case of the head of the Agency for Local Roads of Poltava Region, the court kept the public-interest reasoning and other parts of the verdict public. The plea-agreement verdict in the Pashynskyi case was also initially classified, which we immediately flagged as a very bad precedent. The HACC responded promptly to our criticism and published a partially redacted verdict, which made the details of the agreement clear.

The second reason is the lack of clear rules for concluding agreements. 

In its response to our information request, the SAPO confirmed that it has no separate internal methodology for assessing whether an agreement can be concluded. At the same time, its Development Strategy for 2026–2028 provides for developing unified approaches, and the prosecutor’s office plans to involve judges, lawyers, and civil society organizations in this work. 

The HACC also informed us that it had not conducted any review of its case law on plea agreements. Nevertheless, a discussion is already under way on striking a balance between the effectiveness of criminal justice, the inevitability of liability, the fairness of punishment, and public trust in the anti-corruption system. The groundwork for developing clear policies on concluding agreements has also been laid.

The Pashynskyi agreement illustrates this process well. SAPO’s announcement listed the amounts of fines and compensation but did not explain why these terms were advantageous to the state. The necessary explanation appeared only once the verdict was published. It showed that, under the agreement, the prosecutor obtained testimony regarding other participants and that the overall number of defendants in the case had decreased, which offers a chance to try the case against the remaining defendants before the limitation period expires. 

However, this information came out almost a week after the news of the agreement, when the public had already spent several days discussing, and expressing outrage over, the “billion for freedom.”

The fact that the compensation paid to the budget (UAH 600 million) is smaller than the established damage (UAH 817 million) also turned out not to be accidental. The Pashynskyi case concerns a criminal organization rather than a single defendant, and the damage was caused by the actions of seven people, not one. The parties therefore agreed to partially release Pashynskyi from civil liability, taking into account the obligations of other persons convicted under plea agreements (UAH 111 million in compensation and UAH 40 million to the Armed Forces) as well as his own UAH 500 million for the army’s needs. Taken together, the compensation paid to the budget by all convicted persons in this case does not yet reach the established damage. Whether future verdicts against the remaining defendants will cover it is a question for SAPO.

The third reason is public expectations, and the public wants just punishment. 

Last year, a TI Ukraine sociological survey showed that 60% of Ukrainians consider the number of corrupt officials actually punished to be the most telling indicator of an effective fight against corruption, and that such punishment should involve imprisonment or confiscation. 

Agreements built on fines and charitable contributions do not meet this expectation. That is why SAPO must explain them with particular care, and the rules under which prosecutors agree to conclude plea agreements must be clear before the next high-profile case emerges.

Is the money clean?

In nearly half of the plea-agreement verdicts we analyzed, concluded between July 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026, the accused undertook to make a charitable contribution to the needs of the Armed Forces. This practice emerged after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, that is, even before the updated law on plea agreements in high-level corruption cases was adopted. Today, however, it can be considered almost mandatory for this type of verdict.

Charitable contributions range from UAH 10,000 to UAH 20 million. According to the HACC, more than UAH 321 million was directed to the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in 2025 alone. According to SAPO’s latest data, plea agreements in high-level corruption cases have already channeled more than UAH 1.6 billion to the needs of the Defense Forces. Of this, more than UAH 1.1 billion came through the state fundraising platform United24, more than UAH 272 million through the Come Back Alive foundation, and more than UAH 50 million through the Sternenko Community foundation.

The Serhii Pashynskyi agreement set one of the records for the amounts involved: UAH 600 million in compensation to the state budget, paid in installments over 2.5 years; UAH 400 million, or weapons worth that amount, to the Come Back Alive foundation within six months of the verdict’s announcement; UAH 100 million to the Sternenko Community foundation for weapons within 30 days; and a UAH 850,000 fine as the principal punishment, plus a UAH 17,000 fine and a one-year ban on holding public office as additional punishments.

Three questions arise around this money, and in fact they apply to all the amounts set out in other plea-agreement verdicts.

Has inflation “eaten” the compensation? 

One of the most common arguments made by critics of the Pashynskyi agreement is that damage caused in 2014 is being compensated today at a nominal amount that has lost much of its value over twelve years. In other words, UAH 600 million in 2026 is nowhere near the money Ukraine lost in 2014 through the machinations of the former acting head of the Presidential Administration. 

The argument has merit, but it is aimed not at plea agreements as an institution but at how the state protects its property interests in criminal proceedings generally.

On the whole, the law does not leave the state defenseless against inflation. Under Article 625(2) of the Civil Code, a debtor who has defaulted on a monetary obligation must, at the creditor’s request, pay the debt adjusted for inflation plus 3% per annum. Back in 2018, the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court held that this rule applies to all types of monetary obligations regardless of how they arose, which means it should also extend to damage caused in criminal cases. In addition, Article 1192 of the Civil Code provides that losses from the loss of property are calculated according to its actual value at the time the case is heard. 

In a case concerning misappropriated oil products, such as Pashynskyi’s, this may be of practical importance, since it involves property whose price changed with the market rather than a fixed sum of money. However, recovering this difference would most likely have required a separate expert examination, which would also have taken time and might not have produced any result.

Claims for inflation losses can also be brought in criminal proceedings by filing a civil claim, and case law contains such examples. In a misappropriation case (Article 191(4) of the Criminal Code), the Kamianets-Podilskyi City District Court recovered inflation losses and 3% per annum from the accused. However, because the limitation period for civil claims was applied at the defendant’s request, interest could be recovered only for the last three years. As a result, instead of the more than UAH 419,000 in inflation losses claimed, the state was to receive approximately UAH 30,000. 

There is also such a case at the HACC. In the case of Oleh Halushko, head of an Armed Forces department, the Ministry of Defense sought to recover almost UAH 8 million in inflation losses on top of UAH 21.5 million in principal damage. However, the court delivered an acquittal and left the claim without consideration. The review of this verdict is still ongoing: in June 2026, the Supreme Court quashed the HACC Appeals Chamber’s ruling upholding the acquittal, so the issue of compensation adjusted for inflation losses may also be reconsidered.

To recover inflation losses, the obligation must be monetary, that is, clearly defined as a specific amount. In criminal cases, this is mostly possible only where funds have been embezzled or misappropriated, not with other types of damage. The Pashynskyi case did not involve the seizure of a specific sum of money; the subject matter was oil products.

Thus, the problem is not that the law prohibits taking inflation into account, but that no mechanism does so automatically. The court cannot index the amount of damage on its own initiative or go beyond the claims submitted. And if the injured state authority, or a prosecutor acting in the interests of the state, has not claimed compensation for inflation losses, those losses will be recovered neither under a guilty verdict in ordinary proceedings nor in proceedings based on a plea agreement. 

In the Pashynskyi case, no civil claim was filed at all. Therefore, a claim for inflation losses could neither be granted by the verdict nor taken into account in the agreement, and the amount of damage was fixed at its nominal 2014 value of UAH 600 million. Moreover, even when such a claim is filed, it is exposed to the limitation period for civil claims, which in cases involving events from a decade ago may reduce it to symbolic amounts.

Hence our recommendation. The issue of inflation losses should be addressed primarily to the prosecution (in this case, SAPO) and to the bodies representing the state as the injured party. A claim for their recovery should become a standard part of civil claims in cases involving the theft of state property, and taking it into account should become one of the criteria by which a prosecutor assesses the amount of compensation in an agreement. 

Separately, it is worth discussing whether the requirement of “full compensation for damages” as a precondition for an agreement covers only the nominal amount of damage or also its real value at the time the agreement is concluded. The law currently gives no direct answer to this question.

Moreover, some of the public’s complaints about the “leniency” of the punishment concern issues that a plea agreement does not resolve. The court did not order confiscation of property in the Pashynskyi case. The SAPO explained that the corresponding additional punishment under Article 255 of the Criminal Code was introduced in June 2020, that is, after the events in the case. The principle prohibiting the retroactive application of a law that worsens a person’s position therefore applies.

2. Why does the money go to foundations rather than to the budget? 

Former Head of the HACC Vira Mykhailenko once explained that it is the prosecution and the defense that agree on where charitable payments should go and in what amount, while the court merely checks whether the agreement complies with the law. Therefore, the question “why these particular foundations?” should be addressed to the parties to the agreement, not to the court. 

But the question should be asked honestly. Are there well-founded concerns about the transparency of the foundations named in the agreement? And if there are none, what difference does it make to the state whether money goes to the budget or to a foundation that procures weapons for the army professionally and accountably? 

In wartime, a large share of the budget goes to defense anyway. A foundation, whether Come Back Alive, Sternenko Community, or any other, may be a faster and more targeted channel in this chain. Moreover, Come Back Alive explicitly states that it does not take a percentage of donations for administrative expenses.

The real risks lie elsewhere. The first is ensuring that the foundation is not connected to the accused or their associates. The second is ensuring that compliance with the condition can be verified. 

Failure to comply with a plea agreement carries separate criminal liability, and the SAPO may ask the HACC to set aside the verdict and hear the case under the general procedure. Notably, in all the time the court has been operating, prosecutors have never filed such a motion. 

According to SAPO, no cases of deliberate non-compliance with agreements have been identified so far, and no convicted person has been held liable for violating the terms of an agreement. Compliance is confirmed by payment documents that are submitted to the court and the prosecutor and added to the case file. In other words, verification of the transfers does exist, but it is carried out solely by SAPO. Beyond that, one can rely on the public reporting of the relevant charitable foundations, which should be open to the general public. If there is demand for reporting specifically on HACC plea-agreement verdicts, it would make sense for the foundations concerned to publish specific information on exactly what the funds from such verdicts were spent on. This would help show which specific needs of the army these donations are meeting.

At the same time, the public reaction to the fact that Pashynskyi must donate to Come Back Alive and Sternenko Community under the agreement has also produced unexpected results. On September 28, the HACC refused to approve a plea agreement with MP Oleksandr Kachnyi in his case concerning illicit enrichment of more than UAH 12.7 million. Kachnyi had admitted guilt and agreed to transfer UAH 3 million to a Come Back Alive project. In her refusal, however, the judge stated that the use of these funds would be beyond the control of the parties and the court, and that the court therefore could not be satisfied that these provisions served the public interest.

3. Whose money is it? 

This is the third and perhaps the most important risk. A formally positive outcome, such as paid compensation or a donation to the army, may be financed with opaque money. The origin of the funds used to fulfill the terms of an agreement should be checked no less thoroughly than, for example, the origin of money posted as bail. 

The SAPO confirmed that, in practice, damages are compensated and charitable contributions are paid not only by the convicted persons themselves but also by third parties; the law does not prohibit this. At the same time, the Criminal Procedure Code does not provide for any separate procedure under which a prosecutor would verify the origin of such funds. The SAPO relies on banks, which, as primary financial monitoring entities, are required to check transactions under anti-money laundering legislation.

However, to be consistent, we must acknowledge something uncomfortable for the critics and recall the special confiscation mechanism. It involves seizing precisely those funds and property whose criminal origin has been expressly established by a court verdict. When it is applied, the state knowingly fills the budget with money obtained through crime. 

From a purely pragmatic standpoint, it is therefore hard to explain why the same logic becomes unacceptable when the funds come not through special confiscation but as compensation for damages or in fulfillment of a charitable condition of an agreement. In the end, the money ends up in the budget or with the army either way, and either way it does not stay with the convicted person. The outrage that “the money did not go to the budget” thus concerns form, not substance. 

Why plea agreements are good after all, and why they need improvement

The main argument in favor of the Pashynskyi agreement lies not in its amount but in the alternative. The events in the case took place in the spring of 2014, yet notices of suspicion were served only in February 2024. The limitation period for abuse of office in this case expires as early as 2028, so the parties explicitly linked the agreement to the fact that it makes it possible to try the case against the other defendants within that period. 

A full trial with several defendants, a large body of evidence, and the defense’s procedural tactics could have lasted for years. Had the limitation period expired in the meantime, the person would have been released from liability altogether, and the state would have received nothing: no verdict and no compensation, not even partial. Despite the European Commission’s requirements, Ukraine’s rules on limitation periods have still not been reformed. In cases investigated decades after the events, a plea agreement is therefore often an alternative not to a harsh sentence but to impunity.

A criminal trial always has a probabilistic outcome. The prosecution considers guilt proven, the defense does not, and the court has the final word. A plea agreement turns probability into certainty: a guilty verdict, the status of a convicted person, real money, and testimony against other participants. A fine is a type of principal punishment under the Criminal Code. It is therefore incorrect to speak of “buying one’s way out” of punishment when the payment is itself a punishment. 

By comparison, another defendant in the Pashynskyi case, Serhii Tyshchenko, received eight years’ imprisonment under a plea agreement and was released from serving the sentence on probation. He transferred UAH 40 million to the Defense Forces and must pay another UAH 110 million to the budget within three years. The “Kurchenko’s oil products” case is not over: there were other suspects, and not all of them entered into plea agreements.

Precisely because plea agreements have become the main way high-level corruption cases are resolved, work on their quality must continue. The HACC should consolidate its approaches to assessing the public interest and make partial redaction of verdicts, rather than full classification, the standard practice wherever full classification is not directly required to protect a person or other proceedings. The SAPO should implement the measures in its Strategy on unified approaches to plea agreements and, in every high-profile case, publicly explain what the state stands to gain. 

Parliament needs to make special confiscation a mandatory condition for approving an agreement where there are legal grounds for it. Wider use of real, albeit shorter, prison terms and additional fines would also improve public perception of such verdicts. 

Finally, the two problems that most fuel outrage over plea agreements lie outside them altogether. These are the unreformed limitation periods, which force prosecutors to negotiate, and the fact that the state does not always use the available mechanisms for recovering inflation losses, so that nominal compensation loses value, whether under a plea agreement or an ordinary verdict. After all, hundreds of millions in damage caused in 2014 are not the same as hundreds of millions in 2026.

Both legislators and practitioners need to address these problems. Until they do, a fair deal remains a better outcome than a case that ends in nothing.

Proposed amendments

Draft law No. 16043 provides that cases on declaring assets unjustified and recovering them to the state revenue will be heard by a single HACC judge. A panel hearing (by three judges) will be possible only upon a motion by a defendant who holds one of the positions on an exhaustive list: a President of Ukraine whose powers have been terminated, member of parliament, Prime Minister, member of the Cabinet of Ministers, Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Prosecutor General, Deputy Prosecutor General – Head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, Head of the Security Service of Ukraine, Director of the State Bureau of Investigation, Director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, Head of the National Agency on Corruption Prevention, Head of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine, Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine, Head of the Accounting Chamber, Head of the State Property Fund of Ukraine, Head of the Central Election Commission, Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, Chair and judges of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, Chair of the Supreme Court, heads of the high specialized courts, and Head of the High Council of Justice.

The draft law also sets out a mechanism for exercising this right. In its ruling on opening proceedings, the court will be required to explain to a defendant on the list their right to file a motion for a panel hearing. Such a motion may be filed only before the case is scheduled for trial on the merits; if it is submitted later, it will be left without consideration. The court will decide on a panel hearing at the preparatory hearing.

As for sanctions cases, the words “by a panel of three judges of the High Anti-Corruption Court” will simply be deleted from the Code of Administrative Procedure. Such cases will be heard by a single judge, with no exceptions and no list of parties entitled to request a panel hearing.

As in the previous version, the Final and Transitional Provisions retain the rule that the previous procedure (panel hearings) applies to both categories of cases in which proceedings were opened before the law enters into force.

What needs improvement

Our main criticism of Draft Law No. 14033 was that it did not specify at what stage, at whose initiative, and in what form the question of a panel hearing in a civil forfeiture case would be decided, relying instead on a vague “complexity” criterion. This concern closely mirrors a problem that the seventh HACC monitoring report has already identified with a similar mechanism in criminal proceedings (in effect since May 16, 2024): the lack of a consistent approach to when a defendant may exercise the right to a panel hearing. The defense has at times exploited this to delay proceedings, notably in the Rotterdam+ case.

The new draft law removes this uncertainty for civil cases, and it does so in precisely the way we suggested as a benchmark. This approach is consistent with the Venice Commission’s position that the allocation of cases, and any exceptions to it, should be based on objective, transparent criteria established in advance by law. It also reduces the risk of decisions being challenged on the grounds that the case was not heard by a “tribunal established by law.”

At the same time, two issues from our previous analysis remain unresolved. The deadlines for appeals in sanctions cases have still not been extended and remain at 5 days.

 

Conclusions

Transparency International Ukraine recommends adopting Draft Law No. 16043 at first reading and as a whole. 

The extension of the procedural deadlines for filing a statement of defense and an appeal in sanctions cases to 15 days should be addressed through a separate draft law.

 

This material is funded by Norway. Its content is the sole responsibility of Transparency International Ukraine and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Norwegian Government. 

Carthage: how the system worked

At the center of the NABU-SAPO investigation is Serhii Kropyva, Deputy Head of the International Cooperation Department of the Prosecutor General’s Office, known on the released tapes by the alias “the Chancellor.” According to the investigation, he owed this to the patronage of “the Chief” himself. Before his appointment to the PGO in August 2025, Kropyva held senior positions in the Cyber Police for a long time (in particular, he was First Deputy Head of the Department), and later served as an advisor to the Prosecutor General and as Deputy Head of the Odesa Regional Military Administration for digitalization. 

According to the investigation, while holding a senior position at the PGO, Kropyva effectively took personal control over the management of criminal proceedings against fraudulent call centers (in particular, under Article 255 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, creation of a criminal organization, and Article 209 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, legalization (laundering) of criminally obtained property).

The scheme allegedly worked in two directions: 

• “covering” and clearing out the market, where call centers under their control were guaranteed immunity in exchange for bribes, while investigative actions and mass searches were carried out against their competitors to “stir things up”; 
• laundering of over UAH 89.9 million in criminally obtained property through overseeing networks of individual entrepreneurs, purchasing real estate (including in Bukovel), cryptocurrency transactions, acquiring luxury items, and registering assets in the names of front persons and close associates. 

The released materials from covert investigative actions revealed a new trend: the individuals in the case systematically studied the HACC’s case law on civil forfeiture, prepared potential witnesses for questioning at NABU, and used their knowledge of procedural nuances to counteract the anti-corruption agencies. 

It was precisely the positions held by the individuals in the case and their understanding of the process that made this investigation an extremely difficult task for NABU detectives. Pavlo Demchuk, Senior Legal Advisor at TI Ukraine, put it this way: 

“Such complex investigations into senior law enforcement officials only demonstrate that the Anti-Corruption Bureau and the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office are truly capable and independent. Documenting other law enforcement officers is a task of the highest difficulty, if only because they understand the methods and tools used by other employees of the prosecution service or the NABU. Given that international partners support anti-corruption reforms, such investigations only show that this support makes sense.”

From an “illusion of calm” to a resignation letter: how the SAPO tapes changed the Prosecutor General’s stance

The reaction of PGO head Ruslan Kravchenko to NABU’s first procedural actions was pointedly calm. He assured that his office was open, that the safe in the photo released by NABU did not belong to him, and that rumors of his escape were fabricated.

“I understand that many would like me to go into hiding, end up in the hospital, or something else. I’ll disappoint my fans. Yesterday I was at my workplace, today I’m working as usual and doing a bit of exercise,” Kravchenko insisted.

He made this statement even as the media was reporting that “the Chief” was none other than Kravchenko. Andrii Borovyk, Executive Director of TI Ukraine, pointed out that in such a situation, the head of an agency cannot remain in office as if nothing had happened. 

“It seems that the Prosecutor General could not have been unaware of this. From the standpoint of reputation and what is best for the country, the most logical thing would be for him to resign.”

And on September 6, during the HACC hearing on the preventive measure for Serhii Kropyva, SAPO prosecutor Mykola Karas dispelled any doubts about who was hiding behind the alias. He read out conversations between Kropyva and Kravchenko in which the former calls the latter “chief.”

“Hello. Yeah, Andreevich, yeah, chief. No, everything’s fine. No, nobody’s giving me a hard time. Who’d dare cross me? You’ve got my back, everyone knows it,” the prosecutor quoted Kropyva as saying.

When these materials were heard in court, the situation changed dramatically, and the clouds, as they say, gathered over the Prosecutor General. The very next day, according to sources of Ukrainska Pravda, after a late-night conversation with President Volodymyr Zelenskyi, Kravchenko submitted his resignation letter, calling it a “political decision.”

Escalation and counterattack: Kravchenko signs a notice of suspicion for Kryvonos and abruptly leaves the country 

On the morning of September 14, despite his announced resignation, Kravchenko made a loud statement: he said he had signed a notice of suspicion for NABU Director Semion Kryvonos, as well as for a person “close to the head of SAPO” Oleksandr Klymenko. In his video address, he also said that his resignation was not an admission of guilt, the result of any deal, or a refusal to fight for his reputation. 

“Operation Carthage was aimed not only at me. Its real goal was to gain access to the materials of criminal proceedings concerning the heads and employees of the NABU and the SAPO. And after that, to remove the Prosecutor General and stop procedural decisions from being made in these cases,” Kravchenko said.

In the same address, he publicly accused Kryvonos of forging official documents to obtain an unlawful benefit and of a “fictitious adoption of a child” to artificially create grounds for evading liability in court. 

Meanwhile, alongside this media attack, an equally telling storyline was unfolding: immediately after these statements were published, it emerged that Kravchenko had left the country. Ukrainska Pravda was the first to report the details: at 2:30 a.m. on September 14, Kravchenko crossed the border in an official car. The official later stated that he was on a business trip abroad to inform international partners about “the real state of affairs in the system of anti-corruption agencies.”

The reaction of the public, the country’s leadership, and the anti-corruption sector only underscored the nature of this demarche. Volodymyr Zelenskyi publicly called on the Verkhovna Rada to immediately support Kravchenko’s dismissal, and the Presidential Office described his actions as unsanctioned freelancing. 

The NABU stated that no notice of suspicion had been officially served on Kryvonos. At a briefing on the situation, Klymenko said that none of the relatives he knew of had received notices of suspicion either, and that Kravchenko’s actions were a continuation of a systemic attack on the independent anti-corruption agencies, which began in earnest with last year’s attempts to subordinate NABU and SAPO to the Prosecutor General’s Office. Incidentally, the heads of the anti-corruption agencies had repeatedly warned about a planned attack on them, including at their press conferences. 

Transparency International Ukraine is convinced that these notices of suspicion are not the outcome of a lengthy investigation but a purely political and performative move designed for media effect. First, the proceedings concerning Kryvonos were entered into the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations back on April 25, 2014, meaning they concern events from 12 years ago that lay dormant and relate to a period long before he became head of NABU. Second, the official proceedings concerning the “person close to Klymenko” relate to fraud and obstruction of the activities of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, not to “influencing HACC judges,” as Kravchenko publicly claimed. Finally, the very method of “serving” the notices, by sending them by mail to NABU’s address instead of delivering them in person, points to an effort to create public noise rather than achieve a procedural result.

All these actions clearly showed that when the law enforcement system operates on the principle of political appointments, its leaders, at a moment of crisis-level exposure, resort not to legal defense but to unprecedented institutional retaliation.

No integrity filter: how a man barred from the NABU and the SAPO came to head the Prosecutor General’s Office

What makes this story especially telling is not the scandal itself but how Kravchenko, before becoming Prosecutor General, tried to get into the anti-corruption agencies. In 2021, he took part in the competition for SAPO prosecutors, and in 2023, he sought the post of NABU Director. In both cases, Kravchenko was eliminated due to the selection commissions’ doubts about his integrity. 

In other words, a person whose candidacy was twice rejected in independent competitive selections became head of the Prosecutor General’s Office within a few years, without any competitive selection, through a purely political procedure. Almost immediately after his appointment, Kravchenko became one of the chief lobbyists of the law that effectively subordinated to him the very agencies he had once been denied the chance to lead. 

On July 22, 2025, the Verkhovna Rada backed Draft Law No. 12414, which aimed to eliminate the independence of the NABU and the SAPO. Publicly defending these changes, Kravchenko assured: “We will be one family.” Only mass protests and pressure from international partners forced the authorities to reverse these provisions. 

“A year ago, they wanted to effectively subordinate the SAPO and the NABU to Ruslan Kravchenko, the Prosecutor General. He held that post then, and he holds it now. But a year later, the NABU and the SAPO, which he failed to subordinate, came to him,” says Andrii Borovyk. “Formally, they came to his subordinates. But, figuratively speaking, they came to his home, in quotation marks, of course.”

The question that remains open: who should decide who leads the prosecution service?

Kravchenko’s career in itself calls into question Ukraine’s established mechanism for appointing the Prosecutor General, where the decision is effectively made by the President and the Verkhovna Rada merely rubber-stamps it. It was precisely this logic that allowed a person twice screened out by the NABU and SAPO selection commissions to obtain a leadership position in the prosecution system without any competitive integrity filter at all, simply through a political decision.

And under the current government, such appointments have now failed for the third time in a row. Before Kravchenko, the post was held by Andrii Kostin, who was also appointed by the President and eventually resigned following a scandal over fake disability status obtained by regional prosecutors. Before him, the post was held by Iryna Venediktova, remembered for effectively “burying” NABU’s crucial investigation into Deputy Head of the Presidential Office Oleh Tatarov. And, as if by habit, both of Kravchenko’s predecessors, like him, had at one point failed a competitive selection: Kostin for the head of SAPO, and Venediktova in the competition for Supreme Court judges. Likewise, none of these Prosecutors General served the maximum six-year term.

Notably, the idea of replacing this political appointment with a transparent competition is not an abstract theory but an already formulated legislative proposal. Back in June 2026, long before Carthage, Draft Law No. 15343 was registered in the Verkhovna Rada. It proposes introducing an open competition for the post of Prosecutor General through the High Council of Justice with the involvement of international experts, as well as a procedure for a vote of no confidence in the Prosecutor General. The authors of the document directly named the problem that this whole story illustrates: “The Prosecutor General’s Office becomes politically dependent on whoever is in power,” precisely because the Prosecutor General is currently appointed by the President with the consent of the Verkhovna Rada rather than by an independent selection commission. 

It is worth noting that introducing competitions for prosecutors of the PGO and regional prosecutor’s offices is also one of the conditions for Ukraine to receive EUR 550 million from the EU under the Ukraine Facility. And the European Commission reminded of this once again after Kravchenko’s scandalous statements.

In other words, these warnings were voiced long before Kropyva and Kravchenko, and each time they came true in almost the same scenario: a political appointment, then a loss of trust, then a loud scandal and resignation. 

The systemic lesson of Carthage: from reputational fires to institutional change

Reducing the Carthage case to luxury watches, mansions, or the personal greed of individual officials means ignoring its main challenge. The scale of this scheme and the scandal that followed became possible not only because of the particular brazenness of the individuals in the case but also because of the architecture of the prosecution system itself. When appointments to key positions are made behind closed doors rather than through a transparent competition, officials answer not to the law but to their personal “chief.”

The NABU-SAPO operation proved the capacity of the anti-corruption infrastructure, but this victory is fragile. Changing specific names in PGO offices will not stop new “Chancellors” from emerging if the principle by which people get these positions remains unchanged.

The only way out of this cycle is to depoliticize the post of Prosecutor General, close systemic loopholes, and hold accountable those who abuse their position. 

 

This material is funded by Norway. Its content is the sole responsibility of Transparency International Ukraine and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Norwegian Government.

Anti-corruption reform and the path to the EU

The first discussion was devoted to the link between anti-corruption reform and Ukraine’s movement toward the EU. It was moderated by Andrii Borovyk, Executive Director of Transparency International Ukraine.

The panelists discussed whether Ukraine’s anti-corruption system has “worked,” and whether the involvement of international experts in the competitions for anti-corruption bodies has proven its worth — including, in particular, the recent selection of 16 new judges for the HACC and its Appeals Chamber. They also touched separately on the accusations that the anti-corruption institutions are “too independent.”

Andrii Borovyk noted that the two main public demands right now are the fight against corruption and EU membership. He invited each speaker to name a single decision Ukraine should take over the next 12 months to come a few steps closer to the European Union. 

Allan Pagh Kristensen, Head of the EU Anti-Corruption Initiative (EUACI), declined to pick a single step and stressed that the EU accession process calls for a comprehensive approach to fighting corruption as well. Among the priorities, he singled out the independence, capacity, and effectiveness of institutions. 

Anastasiia Radina, Head of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Anti-Corruption Policy, likewise did not choose a single decision but named three priorities: 

1) access to independent forensic examination for the NABU and the SAPO;

2) reform of the SBI (linked to protecting the NABU from political influence); 

3) a draft law to curb procedural abuses by the defense.

Vira Mykhailenko, a HACC judge, agreed with the other participants on the need for comprehensive approaches. For her part, she named as priorities the integrity and transparency of public institutions, as well as safeguarding their independence.

Andrii Borovyk also asked whether the involvement of international experts in selecting HACC judges had truly proven its worth. Vira Mykhailenko answered in the affirmative: it adds a lens that heightens the visibility of possible problems and makes it possible to reach the right decision.

Anastasiia Radina, for her part, emphasized that involving international experts in the competitions for the NABU, the SAPO, the HACC, and others is no panacea, but that with them we can hope for a better outcome. She also explained that the key issue right now remains changing the procedure for selecting the SBI director (one of the requirements under the Ukraine Facility plan), where international experts so far play a rather decorative role in decision-making.

“I don’t think a situation like this is possible in every democratic country — where, at an event marking an institution’s anniversary, there is a discussion carrying a degree of criticism, with restrained optimism or pessimism. We may like some things and dislike others. But the very ability to say so openly is a sign of democracy and of a nation’s maturity,” Andrii Borovyk said, summing up the discussion.

The HACC in practice: figures and challenges

During the second panel, the moderator, Stanislav Borys — an attorney and head of the Committee on Criminal and Criminal Procedure Law at the Ukrainian Bar Association — noted that the NABU, the SAPO, the HACC, and the Supreme Court are helping to build a strong, independent state governed by the rule of law.

In particular, during this discussion Pavlo Demchuk, Senior Legal Advisor at TI Ukraine, presented the findings of a report studying the HACC’s practice in 2023–2024. Among other things, he highlighted the following key conclusions:

• in 2019–2024, the HACC heard on average almost 24% of its cases per year;
• the concept of agreements works and is improving: a case that ends in a plea agreement is heard 24 times faster than one that goes through the full cycle;
• 7.4% of all proceedings are closed due to the expiry of limitation periods and pretrial investigation time limits. That is, the public receives no answer as to whether a person is guilty or not, even where significant damages were involved.

Pavlo Demchuk also mentioned a finding from this year’s HACC monitoring report: for the first time, the number of cases heard exceeded the number that came in (in the first half of 2026). In other words, the backlog of pending cases has begun to shrink.

Our expert also drew attention to the ineffectiveness of disciplinary liability for the abuse of procedural rights. 

“Even a disciplinary referral to the bar’s bodies does not always lead to the expected results. Out of 24 proceedings initiated, an actual disciplinary sanction was imposed in only one case,” Pavlo Demchuk noted.

We at TI Ukraine continue to follow the HACC’s work closely. In particular, we analyze the functional and organizational aspects of the court’s work and cover the handling of cases on the HACC Decided platform.

Watch the full broadcast of the event here:

Executive Summary

The seventh HACC monitoring report covers the period from July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026. During this time, our monitoring lawyers attended 1,067 court hearings and analyzed hundreds of court decisions, continuing to assess the court’s procedural efficiency, its compliance with the standards of criminal proceedings, and the implementation of recommendations from previous monitoring stages.

The results point to a mixed picture: the HACC is showing a gradual rise in productivity and improvements in the internal organization of its work, while problems whose resolution depends on parliament or other state bodies remain without an adequate response.

 

Key Achievements

Record productivity and a shift in caseload dynamics. In 2025, the HACC heard 114 criminal cases and convicted 154 persons. In the first half of 2026, the court for the first time heard more cases (72) than the number of new ones it received (71). This made it possible to halt the years-long growth in the backlog of pending proceedings and even to reduce it slightly (from 327 to 322).

Single-judge proceedings have proven effective. The share of proceedings heard by a single judge rose from 22% to 29% of the entire body of pending cases. The difference in time is quite significant: cases in single-judge proceedings are completed in an average of 342 days (11 months), whereas panel proceedings take four times as long — on average 1,365 days (~3 years and 9 months).

Positive trends across monitoring indicators. The share of postponed hearings fell from 35% to 30%, and the share of procedural violations decreased for all categories of hearings.

Growth and partial improvement in the practice of plea agreements. The number of verdicts based on plea agreements grew in absolute terms (72 versus 58 last year) but declined slightly in relative terms (62% versus 66% last year). The first publicly confirmed cases of an actual, albeit shorter, sentence under Article 69-2 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine appeared, along with the practice of partially — rather than fully — sealing the texts of verdicts based on agreements.

Personnel and institutional strengthening. Two new judges appointed following the second HACC competition are already presiding over a number of high-profile proceedings, and in August 2026 the President of Ukraine appointed a further 16 winners of the competition. On November 20, 2025, the assembly of HACC judges approved for the first time the court’s Development Strategy for 2026–2028, which institutionally acknowledges a number of the problems raised in our previous reports — in particular, limitation periods and the court’s inadequate premises. After lengthy consultations, the government ultimately resolved the problem of the court’s premises.

Critical Challenges

The ineffective regulation of limitation periods remains the biggest problem, and it is worsening. During the reporting period, 22 persons were released from criminal liability due to the expiry of limitation periods (versus 13 last year), and 9 persons were released from punishment (versus only 1 last year). A large share of these closures fall under Articles 364 and 368 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine — that is, serious corruption offenses.

The abuse of procedural rights is taking on new forms. Whereas previously the parties most often resorted to simple failures to appear, now the manipulation of servicemember status, the artificial creation of conflicts of interest, hours-long repetitive speeches, and mass groundless motions are becoming widespread. Judges have begun to apply monetary penalties more actively; however, the court still lacks the power to impose such penalties on defense attorneys, and cooperation with the Bar Qualification and Disciplinary Commissions of the Bar remains ineffective.

The closure of cases due to the expiry of pretrial investigation time limits (the Lozovyi amendments) continues to threaten cases. The number of motions to close cases on this ground rose from 29 to at least 41 over the year, and three cases were closed at first instance. The HACC Appeals Chamber closed two cases on this ground. 

Inconsistent approaches to the consequences of replacing a judge have taken on new relevance in connection with the competition for the HACC Appeals Chamber. The transfer of sitting first-instance judges to the appellate level creates the risk that a number of high-profile proceedings will have to be reheard from the beginning. 

The problems with single-judge proceedings are procedural in nature: there is no established, consistent practice on when a case should begin to be heard by a panel or by a single judge, which the defense from time to time exploits to delay the process.

The shortage of electronic bracelets available to the police persists, despite an increase in their number. In 5 cases, the court was forced to lift the obligation to wear a bracelet because it was in fact unavailable at the police, applying less reliable alternative preventive measures instead.

Opaque communication around agreements undermines their public perception. The texts of some verdicts remain fully sealed, and there is still no methodology for assessing the public interest, even though improving such approaches is envisaged by the SAPO Development Strategy.

Acquittals and appellate review point to certain areas for improving the quality of pretrial investigation. Of the six acquittals in the reporting period, some are linked to a weak evidentiary base and others to entrapment by the SBI or the SSU. Of the HACC verdicts reviewed on appeal, 43% were modified or overturned, mostly due to the incorrect delineation of related elements of offenses and incomplete justification of the evaluation of evidence.

Recommendations

To the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine:

• adopt draft law No. 15354 in the first reading and finalize it for the second reading — providing for the interruption, rather than merely the suspension, of limitation periods from the moment the indictment is sent to the court; extending the grounds for suspension to all corruption articles (not only NABU and SAPO cases); and proportionately strengthening penalties for key corruption articles;
• introduce mechanisms into the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine to streamline court proceedings: formalize best practices for conducting hearings and give judges effective tools to respond to the abuse of procedural rights, including the power to impose monetary penalties on defense attorneys;
• abolish the automatic closure of cases due to the expiry of pretrial investigation time limits;
• establish in law that, provided hearings are fully audio- and video-recorded, the consent of the parties to the proceedings is not a mandatory condition for continuing the proceedings after a judge is replaced;
• eliminate the ambiguity in determining the point at which the right to panel proceedings is exercised, and extend single-judge proceedings to cases on the recognition of assets as unjustified and to sanctions-related proceedings;
• establish in law that the application of special confiscation is a mandatory condition for approving a plea agreement where the grounds for its application provided by law exist.

 

To the High Anti-Corruption Court:

• organize the handling of cases at risk of limitation periods expiring more effectively — coordinating hearing schedules in advance and responding to unjustified failures to appear;
• consistently implement organizational approaches to managing hearings: standardize time limits for speeches, restore the practice of holding parties liable for contempt of court (Article 185-3 of the Code of Ukraine on Administrative Offenses), hear only the parties concerned on motions, and make wider use of state-funded defense attorneys to ensure the continuity of proceedings;
• consolidate and formalize as a standard the existing practice of partially sealing verdicts based on agreements.

 

To the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine:

• ensure stable funding for the procurement of electronic monitoring devices, in particular by identifying funding sources for 2027.

 

To the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office:

• accelerate the implementation of the measures in the 2026–2028 Development Strategy on establishing consistent approaches to concluding plea agreements.

Implementing these recommendations will contribute to further strengthening the HACC’s institutional capacity and will increase the effectiveness of holding perpetrators accountable for top-level corruption offenses in Ukraine.

When assessing the implementation of the recommendations, we found that most of those left unimplemented depend largely on parliament rather than on the HACC as a judicial body. 

This report was prepared by Transparency International Ukraine with the financial support of Sweden.

Where these positive numbers come from

To my mind, the most telling thing is not the impression the figures themselves make, but what lies behind them. From the very start, hundreds of cases flowed into the HACC, and for years the backlog of pending cases grew relentlessly — from 149 in 2019 to 327 in 2025. This not only reflected the court’s rising workload; it also gave the HACC’s opponents grounds to question whether it should exist at all. 

But as the court built up experience and worked on its own mistakes, the picture began to shift. In 2025, the HACC heard a record 114 criminal cases, and in the first half of 2026 the number of cases heard (72) exceeded, for the first time, the number of new ones filed (71). The years-long accumulation of pending proceedings finally halted — and even edged down, from 327 to 322 cases. 

As for verdicts, in the first half of 2026 alone the HACC handed down 65: 82 persons were convicted and 8 acquitted. Given that the court delivered 109 verdicts in all of 2025, the current figures again point to a marked rise in its output. It also applied special confiscation to 10 persons, confiscating almost UAH 71.8 million in the process.

Over seven years, the HACC has handed down 431 verdicts concerning 601 persons: 398 convictions and 33 acquittals, with 211 of the convictions based on agreements. Those convicted include judges, prosecutors, heads of state enterprises, members of the government, and former and sitting members of parliament. Custodial sentences have gone, among others, to sitting MP Anatolii Hunko, former Prosecutor General’s Office official Dmytro Sus, former MP Ruslan Solvar, and Orest Furdychko, former director of the Institute of Agroecology of the NAAS.

A separate result of the HACC’s work is the civil forfeiture of unjustified assets: property worth almost UAH 230 million in total has been seized from 48 officials. 

These figures capture only part of the picture. To see the fuller one, it matters how many convictions have entered into legal force, how many of those convicted are actually behind bars, and how many of them are senior officials. It is just as important to distinguish between the fines, confiscations, and compensation for damage to the state that have been imposed and those that have actually been enforced. The corresponding measure of the Rule of Law Roadmap was due to be implemented by the end of 2026.

Voluntary payments under agreements — contributions for the needs of the Armed Forces, in particular — serve a public good, but they are not a punishment, and they are hard to classify as the recovery of resources the state has lost. Even so, they show how the tools of criminal justice are being used to help replenish the budget.

So where did this positive change come from? There are several explanations.

First, single-judge proceedings — introduced in law back in 2024 — have proven their effectiveness in practice: the share of cases heard by a single judge has risen from 22% to 29% of all proceedings before the HACC. 

The difference in time is striking. Single-judge cases wrap up in about 11 months on average, whereas panel proceedings drag on for nearly 3 years and 9 months. In some instances a single judge proved faster still: the case of Viktoriia Poltavchenko, acting director of one of the state enterprises of an NAAS institute, took the court just 5 months. Even the longer proceedings in this format stay within relatively moderate bounds — the case of Anatolii Khmilkivskyi, a member of the Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi District Council in Odesa Region, took exactly one year.

Another factor likely to reinforce this momentum is the court’s long-awaited new personnel. The two judges appointed through the second HACC competition are already presiding over a number of high-profile proceedings, which has noticeably eased the court’s load. And since the President of Ukraine has by now appointed a further 17 winners of the competition to judgeships at the HACC and its Appeals Chamber, the scale of the reinforcement will grow further still. The appointment of another 5 judges, meanwhile, remains in limbo.

It is also worth looking at the make-up of verdicts over the past 12 months — from July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026. In that time, the number of verdicts based on agreements rose to 72, up from 58 in the previous 12 months, although their share of all convictions slipped slightly, from 66% to 62%.

For the first time, too, there have been cases where a person convicted under an agreement still serves an actual, if shorter, sentence. Under one of the highest-profile agreements of the past year, former Chairman of the Supreme Court Vsevolod Kniaziev was nonetheless sentenced to 4 years behind bars. The approach to transparency is changing as well: in the case of Oleksii Basan, head of the Agency of Local Roads of Poltava Region, the court sealed only part of the information from public access rather than the entire verdict, as had usually been the practice. This is still an exception rather than the norm, but the very fact that the approach is being used matters. 

That said, a rising number of agreements does not in itself prove they are effective. In top-level corruption cases, their value lies not only in a faster verdict but also in incriminating testimony against other participants and the organizers of schemes. Such information cannot always be made public right away, so as not to harm the ongoing investigation. But in due course it should be assessed whether that testimony led to new verdicts. For now, SAPO’s policy on concluding agreements and its criteria for “public interest” are not always clear, and some verdicts are sealed in full. So the SAPO and the HACC need not only to use this tool but also to explain its purpose and results to the public convincingly.

The numbers explain why the public views such agreements warily. Almost half of the accused undertook to transfer between UAH 10,000 and UAH 20 million for the needs of the Armed Forces, yet defendants received actual — if reduced — prison terms in only three cases. Nor did the parties agree on large fines as an additional punishment. According to a TI Ukraine survey, 60% of Ukrainians consider actual punishment — imprisonment or the confiscation of property — the main criterion of an effective fight against corruption.

It is important to understand the nature of the progress described here. It is not that the HACC has “learned” to work more effectively under unchanged conditions; rather, it shows that the tools adopted earlier by the legislature — often imperfectly drafted, riddled with gaps and ambiguities — have finally begun to yield measurable results in practice. 

Single-judge proceedings, for one — unquestionably a step forward — still lack a consistent approach to when the accused may demand that a panel of judges hear the case after all. And unjustified exceptions that bar single-judge hearings for certain categories of officials (for instance, cases involving MPs’ false asset declarations) narrow the mechanism’s potential. Yet even in this half-built form, single-judge proceedings work — and, as we can see, to tangible effect.

Why the upward trend in the HACC’s efficiency is still fragile

The reason is that the external problems — the ones whose solution depends above all on parliament — have gone unaddressed for years. Which means the progress achieved could be lost at any moment.

Take the ineffective regulation of limitation periods, which we have consistently documented since 2023: it has not merely gone unresolved but has grown worse. A lengthy trial in a top-level corruption case does not, in itself, interrupt the running of the limitation period, so proceedings can end not in a finding of guilt but in the person’s release once the time set by law has elapsed. Interrupting the period would mean that, after an event defined by law, the count starts anew rather than resuming from the point where it was suspended. Over the past year, the number of people released from liability because those periods expired rose from 13 to 22, and those released from punishment from one to nine.

The lion’s share of these closures fall under Articles 364 and 368 of the Criminal Code — among the very articles used to classify top-level corruption. On this ground, those released from liability include former Minister of Agrarian Policy Mykola Prysiazhniuk, suspected of securing an unlawful win for private firms in Agrarian Fund tenders worth more than UAH 521 million, and all four defendants at once in the case of corruption at the Odesa Port, with damages exceeding UAH 21 million. The specific problems that led to these limitation periods expiring — and the handling of such cases more broadly — can be followed on our HACC Decided platform.

Pressure on the court and attempts to reassess its institutional capacity — like what unfolded around the Vlasenko-Buzhanskyi Temporary Investigative Commission — add no stability either. We studied the commission’s report and concluded that the document rests on selective analysis and contains a good many illogical and manipulative conclusions. 

The HACC’s effectiveness cannot be reduced to the ratio between the cost of running it and the money recovered for the budget. The court’s core task is independent and fair justice in top-level corruption cases, and its public value is measured also by the inevitability of punishment and by trust in its rulings.

At the same time, the public has every right to know the financial side of the HACC’s work too: how much the state spends to run it, and what volume of confiscations, fines, and compensation has not only been imposed but actually enforced. The absence of consolidated data does not make this a manipulative question — it points to the need for a separate analysis.

The commission’s own chair, Serhii Vlasenko, publicly alleged pressure and political persecution by the NABU, the SAPO, and the HACC even before the commission had finished its work — which alone casts doubt on the impartiality of its final conclusions. Episodes like this divert the court’s resources and attention from its core job.

One more point worth stating plainly again: the HACC is a body of justice, not part of an investigator-prosecutor tandem. That means the court’s task is not to produce results together with the NABU and the SAPO, but first and foremost to test the quality of their work impartially. And that is precisely why, among other things, the court must acquit defendants where the prosecution has failed to prove its case. 

Let me also recall that the NABU and the SAPO are only one side of the process, alongside defense attorneys and the accused. The fact that detectives and prosecutors are pursuing ever more high-profile investigations of senior officials raises the stakes for the court, but it does not make the HACC an “extension” of the investigation. On the contrary, the prominence of these investigations underscores just how critically important the Anti-Corruption Court’s institutional independence is. 

And although most high-profile proceedings — such as the Midas and Dynasty cases — are still at the investigation stage, the HACC has already shown its consistency and impartiality in choosing preventive measures for the defendants in them. The case against Yuliia Tymoshenko, by contrast, moved from pretrial investigation to trial fairly quickly. In preparing for the hearing, the defense deployed the argument that no judge could be impartial toward the politician given her long-standing rhetoric. For now, the case is at the preparatory hearing stage.

What it will take to turn a hint of positive change into a trend

Without legislative change, the positive trend will remain fragile. It could swing unpredictably from case to case and from period to period, depending on which proceedings happen to reach their conclusion in a given year.

To consolidate the trend, parliament needs to:

1. Adopt amendments to Article 49 of the Criminal Code that genuinely interrupt — rather than merely suspend — the running of limitation periods in top-level corruption cases.
2. Give the court effective tools against the abuse of procedural rights — in particular, the power to impose monetary penalties on defense attorneys.
3. Abolish the automatic closure of cases over the formal expiry of pretrial investigation time limits.
4. Remove the ambiguity around the point of transition to panel proceedings and scrap the unjustified exceptions to single-judge proceedings.

For years we have watched the people’s elected representatives fail to pass these changes — even though they have been raised time and again at various levels. Perhaps one reason has been that more and more MPs are themselves becoming defendants in corruption cases. Perhaps it lies in the stagnation of the Rada’s own work in the eighth year of this convocation. But these and other arguments can no longer stand as excuses for not making the changes that are needed. 

New challenges have emerged, too — tied not only to the size of bail in top-level corruption cases but also to the origin of the funds that third parties and companies post on suspects’ behalf. A telling example is the bail for former minister Herman Halushchenko, which the court reduced from UAH 200 million to UAH 150 million. According to the investigation, this money was collected and laundered through dozens of enterprises and more than a hundred financial transactions, after which four companies transferred it to a dedicated HACC account. Among those the investigation suspects of organizing the scheme is Iryna Mudra, former Deputy Head of the Office of the President. Mudra herself, meanwhile, had bail set at UAH 20 million.

These cases raise a broader question: who should verify that bail money is of lawful origin, and at what stage — and should the court react if the money comes from companies with a questionable financial history? The same goes for the compensation, restitution, and payments to the Armed Forces made under agreements: is the origin of these funds, and of the payers themselves, ever checked? The relevant legislative initiatives have already been registered in the Verkhovna Rada, but their consideration remains in limbo. We will describe the possible mechanisms for such checks, and the specifics of concluding plea agreements in top-level corruption cases, in separate materials.

How transparent and well-reasoned bail decisions are will determine trust in preventive measures in top-level corruption cases. The effectiveness of agreements, by contrast, should be judged by other criteria: the fairness of the punishment, the value of the incriminating testimony, the recovery of lost resources for the state, and a result the public can understand.

Since returning from recess, MPs have not taken up a single anti-corruption initiative. They even struck from the agenda the draft Anti-Corruption Strategy for 2026–2030 — and the timely adoption of that document, by the end of September, is tied not only to a coherent fight against corruption but also to Ukraine’s financial support under the Ukraine Facility Plan. This matters for the HACC as well: without a coherent state anti-corruption policy, the legislative amendments the court needs will keep being passed piecemeal or postponed.

As long as parliament keeps putting off the decisions that are needed, the progress the HACC has achieved will remain fragile.

1. NABU and SAPO are among the most independent law enforcement bodies there are — impervious to pressure even from the highest offices of the state. Even when it comes to the Office of the President.

On the tapes, Mudra and Mykytas say plainly that walking into the anti-corruption agencies with the kind of offers or pressure that pass for “business as usual” in Ukrainian politics is a waste of effort. The people caught in these conversations openly acknowledge the autonomy of the NABU and the SAPO, all but stating outright that Bankova Street — the seat of the President’s Office — is no longer an umbrella that can guarantee immunity or quietly bury a case. This is the best proof that, over years of reform, the NABU and the SAPO have managed to build a durable immunity to instructions from outside.

For society and for international partners, this is an important marker of the anti-corruption institutions’ genuine independence. When an investigation reaches officials of the rank of a deputy head of the Office of the President, it shows that there are no “untouchables,” whatever their post or their proximity to the rooms where decisions are made. In this instance, institutional independence outran private political arrangements. And it likewise showed that last year’s protests in defense of NABU’s and SAPO’s independence were not in vain.

2. Today’s senior officials do not shrink from taking part in schemes alongside people already suspected or accused of corruption.

Take Mykytas: the Forrest Gump case brings his fifth notice of suspicion. Despite a toxic background, a trail of criminal proceedings, and life spent permanently in law enforcement’s sights, such figures remain sought-after partners for those currently in power — because they know how to “sort things out” and have no shortage of the right contacts. This points to a deep deformation of power, one in which well-worn schemes and ready-made connections are prized above any reputational risk.

Bringing such people in underscores how narrow the circle is of those willing to run dubious operations at the very top. Senior officials, in all likelihood, knowingly join forces with those whose reputations are already compromised, in the hope that status and the levers of influence they hold can offset their partners’ toxicity. Yet each new notice of suspicion only multiplies the systemic failures of that cooperation.

3. Many of the powerful, for all their assurances to international partners, still want to establish controlling influence over the anti-corruption bodies.

Public declarations of devotion to reform and to meeting the demands of European integration regularly shatter against behind-the-scenes attempts to bring key institutions to heel. For many in government, the independence of NABU and SAPO remains a convenient slogan meant for external consumption only, while inside the system the search for “loopholes” and levers of influence never stops. The urge to control how leadership is appointed, how investigations unfold, or how audits are conducted has gone nowhere — nor have designs on assembling one’s own “personnel reserve” for these institutions.

This double standard poses a constant threat to the country’s entire anti-corruption architecture. Attempts to install loyal people, or to curb the procedural independence of prosecutors and detectives, expose the heart of the matter: those in power still treat a controllable law enforcement as an element of their own security. That is precisely why safeguarding these bodies’ independence remains a daily challenge, not a task already accomplished.

4. A senior official’s sound decisions and good deeds do not earn them an indulgence.

For all Iryna Mudra’s work in setting up the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, her part in the scheme to raise bail for Halushchenko and in the corporate raiding of state enterprises will not be forgotten. For a long time, Mudra was regarded as a key driver of the international reparations mechanisms, yet the suspicion has dealt a serious blow to her reputation. Political reality makes the point: no past merits, no lofty affairs of state, can serve as a “shield” or an advance credit to justify unlawful acts.

The wartime and diplomatic context only raise the bar society sets for officials’ ethics. She will enter Ukrainian history and the public record not through her appearances on international stages, but through her banal participation in shadow schemes to launder funds and unlawfully redistribute assets. It is a sobering lesson for everyone in the corridors of power: public achievements do not paper over hidden, allegedly corrupt acts, and society will not hand out indulgences for past accomplishments.

5. We do not know how deep corruption runs or how far it has spread, but it is becoming ever harder to conceal. And the conditions are now in place for those guilty in such schemes to be punished.

Since last November, after the first notices of suspicion in the Midas case, we have seen a further string of high-profile investigations, and their range — like the range of people drawn into them — keeps widening. But we can already see the momentum of these cases, and the very fact that this work is being done speaks less to how widespread corruption is than to the strong likelihood that it will be exposed, and that those named will stand trial. 

The steady stream of new notices of suspicion lays bare the real depth of the problem, but at the same time it establishes a fundamentally new level of transparency. The systematic work of the anti-corruption institutions is gradually changing the risk arithmetic for would-be corrupt actors: the cost of exposure is coming to outweigh any potential shadow profit. When law enforcement works without regard for high office, the sheer inevitability of disclosure ought to become the most powerful tool for preventing likely new crimes. And it is already working: as we recall, officials at the Ministry of Justice never did agree to cooperate with the organized criminal group led by Mykytas and Mudra.

6. Nationalizing a Russian asset does not mean it will work well for Ukraine.

This is a lesson not yet learned and not yet fully worked through, but the warning flags are already up. For it was precisely after the Russian Alfa-Bank was nationalized and turned into the state-owned Sense Bank that the conditions emerged for interested parties to install the people they needed on its board and to push the operations they wanted through the bank. Nationalizing enemy property under patriotic slogans effectively opened the way to creating a new shadow resource under the roof of state institutions. Swapping the nominal owner from a Russian oligarch to the Ukrainian state did not change the substance: the bank came under threat of turning into a captive instrument for scheming.

This episode throws light on one of the gravest systemic dangers in the process of stripping Russian property out of the Ukrainian economy: without independent management, seized assets become a tempting morsel for operators on the inside. Handing property into state ownership without transparent public oversight and independent management only breeds the temptation to use these resources to legalize dirty money or serve private interests. Confiscating an asset from the enemy is only a quarter of the job; the main thing is to keep it from being plundered or commandeered once it is inside the country.

Timur Mindich (“Karlsson”) and Oleksandr Tsukerman (“Sugarman”)

Timur Mindich and Oleksandr Tsukerman

According to investigators, the two jointly and in coordination ran the organization — setting the rules of secrecy (a ban on using surnames, communication through messaging apps, code names) and distributing funds among the participants. Both left the country before the notices of suspicion were served and have been put on the wanted list.

The HACC issued the following rulings on them:

• December 1, 2025 — detention in absentia for Mindich;
• November 28, 2025 — detention in absentia for Tsukerman.

Ihor Myroniuk (“Rocket”)

Ihor Myroniuk. Photo: Suspilne News/Oleksii Arunian

The conduit for funds from the energy sector to the “office”: according to investigators, the main cash sums passed through him from Fursenko (Tsukerman’s trusted associate) to “Karlsson.” Investigators describe both him and Basov as people who controlled the money flows rather than merely carrying out orders.

After the initial measure, the HACC’s rulings on Myroniuk changed as follows:

• November 12, 2025 — detention with UAH 126 million bail;
• March 5, 2026 — bail reduced to UAH 100 million;
• March 31, 2026 — the HACC Appeals Chamber raised bail back to UAH 126 million;
• April 29, 2026 — bail reduced to UAH 112 million;
• June 23, 2026 — bail reduced to UAH 85 million.

Myroniuk’s bail has still not been posted, so he remains in custody to this day.

Dmytro Basov (“Tenor”)

Dmytro Basov. Photo: RBC-Ukraine

Through his post as Energoatom’s executive director for physical protection and security, Basov handled both the laundering of funds and the cover function — he was the one responsible for detecting and neutralizing “threats” from oversight bodies. Basov is the second suspect (along with Myroniuk) with operational control over the flows, not merely an executor.

After his measure was set, events unfolded as follows:

• November 12, 2025 — a HACC investigating judge ordered Basov detained with UAH 40 million bail;
• November 26, 2025 — bail posted in full;
• July 10, 2026 — a new suspicion for laundering funds within the “Barrier” scheme.

Ihor Fursenko (“Rioshyk”)

Ihor Fursenko. Photo: Suspilne News/Polina Palamarchuk

Tsukerman’s trusted associate in the “back office”: he arranged the day-to-day needs of the “office” and personally took part in laundering funds.

For Fursenko:

• November 12, 2025 — measure set: detention with UAH 95 million bail;
• November 24, 2025 — bail posted.

Lesia Ustymenko and Liudmyla Zorina

Lesia Ustymenko and Liudmyla Zorina

The organization’s bookkeeping in the “back office” was divided by function: according to the case file, Ustymenko was assigned to keep the accounts, notably in a file code-named “Manhattan,” while Zorina handled the records of front companies and documents.

For both suspects:

• November 12–13, 2025 — the HACC set measures: detention with bail of UAH 25 million and UAH 12 million;
• November 13, 2025 — UAH 37 million bail was posted for the two of them.

Oleksii Chernyshov (“Che Guevara”)

Oleksii Chernyshov. Photo: his Facebook profile

The end recipient of part of the laundered money in the energy episode — according to investigators, the funds were passed to him directly or through his wife. Chernyshov is also a separate suspect in the “Dynasty” episode, over his alleged involvement in laundering presumably criminally obtained funds into the estates in Kozyn.

Chernyshov’s path after that suspicion:

• November 18, 2025 — detention with UAH 51.6 million bail;
• November 19, 2025 — bail posted by two private individuals;
• December 1, 2025 — the HACC Appeals Chamber altered the measure, lifting the requirement to surrender his Ukrainian passport;
• May 12, 2026 — a further suspicion, in the episode concerning money laundering in luxury construction;
• July 7, 2026 — the HACC did not extend Chernyshov’s obligation to wear an electronic bracelet.

This was not his first preventive measure, however. Even before Midas, in the summer of 2025, the High Anti-Corruption Court set a measure for Oleksii Chernyshov — then Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Unity — in a case involving abuse of official position and receipt of an unlawful benefit. He was set bail of UAH 120 million. Within a few days the bail was posted and the official walked out of the pretrial detention center.

It was after this suspicion that the authorities made their attempt to destroy the independence of the NABU and the SAPO.

Herman Halushchenko (“Professor”)

Herman Halushchenko. Photo: Suspilne News

In the main episode, he appears not as a direct organizer but as the person whose official clout — as energy minister — Basov and Myroniuk used to pressure Energoatom’s counterparties.

Halushchenko’s path was turbulent:

• November 19, 2025 — dismissal from the Ministry of Justice;
• February 15, 2026 — Halushchenko was detained while trying to leave Ukraine, and on February 16 he was served a notice of suspicion;
• February 17, 2026 — detention with UAH 200 million bail;
• April 15, 2026 — his measure was extended;
• June 12, 2026 — bail reduced to UAH 150 million;
• June 29, 2026 — bail posted in full.

Андрій Єрмак 

Andrii Yermak. Photo: Office of the President

He is a suspect not in the main energy episode but separately — in the “Dynasty” episode (laundering funds into the construction of luxury estates). Whether Yermak appears on the Operation Midas tapes is not known for certain.

Yermak’s path after Operation Midas:

• November 28, 2025 — dismissal from the Office of the President;
• May 14, 2026 — detention with UAH 140 million bail;
• May 18, 2026 — bail posted;
• August 10, 2026 — the HACC eased his procedural obligations.

In the “Dynasty” episode, the High Anti-Corruption Court set measures for four more suspects: Hennadii Opalchuk (UAH 10.6 million bail), Serhii Siranchuk (UAH 20 million bail), Liliia Lysenko (UAH 9.9 million bail), and Maryna Medvedieva (UAH 15 million bail).

***

As we can see, the tree of alleged high-level corruption tied to the “Barrier” scheme keeps branching out, as shown by the latest notices of suspicion — notably to Iryna Mudra, Maksym Mykytas, and Viktor Dubovyk.

The details of what the Forrest Gump and Themis suspects did are already being discussed in HACC courtrooms, where preventive measures are being set for the new NABU–SAPO suspects.

Ultimately, these may be far from the last suspicions in these episodes.